Shell-out game

Buying into this 'debt cure' is worse than the affliction

BOSTON (MarketWatch) -- If you believe the sun doesn't cause skin cancer but sunscreen does, Kevin Trudeau can help you get out of debt.

There might not seem to be an obvious connection, but Trudeau is the infomercial hotshot behind the multimillion seller "Natural Cures 'They' Don't Want You to Know About," a book that posits -- among other things -- that sunscreen causes skin cancer.

Trudeau has now turned his considerable marketing talents to tackling America's debt problems with his new book "Debt Cures 'They' Don't Want You to Know About," supported by a 30-minute infomercial designed to look like an independent talk show.

In the show, Trudeau's story boils down to this: "The man is keeping you down." It's not your fault you have all that debt, it's the fault of those big banks that gave you credit in the first place. People don't cause their own debts, banks do.

The infomercial has that slightly greasy feel -- kind of like sunscreen -- so I had to check out the book.

It's not some cheap book. "Debt Cures" costs $29.95 plus $11.95 for shipping and handling. That struck me as odd, if only because Trudeau says in his infomercial that banks should simply include fees -- charged on late payments or exceeding the credit limit -- as part of "interest." By that logic, Trudeau should call the shipping charges "part of the price" and say his book sells for $41.90.

But if you call for the book, you will be offered a whole lot of other goods and services, and you'll be expected to subscribe to the monthly Debt Cures newsletter for $9.95 per month. By the time you get off the phone, if you fall for the wide range of sales pitches, you'll be about $250 deeper in debt and will add to that debt every succeeding month.

Thankfully, if buying "Debt Cures" doesn't kill you (financially speaking) it can save you, as the information it contains is fine.

Alas, there are no easy "cures" to an individual's debt problems. Truth be told, most of the information is readily available in personal finance columns you can find online or in books that are readily available in your local library.

What's more, some of Trudeau's cures have actually reached their expiration date, such as his first suggestion for rebuilding credit: "piggybacking." That's when someone with a good credit score makes someone with a bad score an "authorized user" on an account. The piggybacker never uses the card, but gets the benefit of the regular payments from the person with good credit; the problem is that the credit-scoring industry pretty much wiped out the practice in September, when it stopped considering accounts on which the borrower is an authorized user.

If I could have reached Trudeau to discuss the book -- and I tried but no one answering the phones seemed able or interested to track him down once they learned it wasn't a sales call -- I would have expected him to take the position of his infomercial, namely that this is just one more case of the man keeping consumers down.

No easy way out

"There's no secret loopholes, no magic formulas, no way to wiggle out of legitimate debt other than the things we already know about," says Gerri Detweiler, author of "The Ultimate Credit Handbook," one of the classics for helping consumers learn how to properly handle debt. "Package it any way you want, it's still the same basic advice ... and it's nothing you need to get a monthly newsletter to learn."

That's not stopping Trudeau, who relishes in calling himself the "most feared man in Corporate America" and who says in the infomercial that he's the "messiah" for consumers.

It's hard to believe that any "messiah" will arrive in the form of a guy who was banned by the Federal Trade Commission "from appearing in, producing, or disseminating future infomercials that advertise any type of product, service, or program to the public, except for truthful infomercials for informational publications." (This is why he moved from selling health-care products to selling information to fix problems, although the FTC went after him again in September on claims made supporting his "weight-loss cures.")

Moreover, the would-be credit savior telling you how "to turn the tables" on the banks also has a 1990s conviction on his record for credit-card fraud. He's hardly the next Ralph Nader he fashions on television.

"A consumer advocate is supposed to be somebody who gets as much information as possible out to the maximum number of people who need it, at the lowest possible cost ... if any," says Marc Eisenson of Good Advice Press, author of the 1980s classic "The Banker's Secret," the book which first taught Americans the value of prepaying mortgages and auto loans.

"If you want good advice on debt, you can find it from a number of different books, all available for free from your local library. ... If you're paying a lot of money to get fancy ideas on how to cure debt problems, it's a sign of how you got those debt problems to begin with. Skip the book, visit the library, and use your savings to pay one of your bills; that'll be a good first step."

Chuck
Jaffe

Chuck Jaffe is a nationally syndicated financial columnist. Follow him on Twitter @ChuckJaffe.

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